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Bringing Up Baby (1938) More at IMDbPro »

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184 comments in total

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45 out of 57 people found the following comment useful :-
What's with the recent bashing of this film?, 13 October 2004

Author: Se Cardeira (senocardeira@alentejo.zzn.com) from Dili, Timor Leste

It's not just a classic - It's a timeless one! Katharine Hepburn (by her own accounts) was in two minds about playing screwball comedy. But she pulls off the characterization of the mad-cappest heroin/heiress ever portrayed on film. It's NOT Kate. It's Kate brilliantly breaking out of her 1930s typecast. The pace is fast, Cary Grant is brilliant as the professor Kate harasses/helps/falls in love with throughout. And what about Susan's aunt and the major? Priceless! Kudos to Baby, as well. I think maybe a few reviewers have been taking their humor from watching 1930s European comedies. Unless it's all out and out vaudeville or cabaret transpositions you're watching, I wouldn't recommend making those your standards for judging "Bringing Up Baby". Worse still if you're judging by American/European standards of the 21st Century. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying since you can't compare this to virtually anything of those, just enjoy the ride. The Acting you CAN compare, though. And I put my money & soul on Hepburn, Grant & Baby every time.

10/10

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42 out of 52 people found the following comment useful :-
"I can't give you anything but love, Baby!", 12 October 2001

Author: intercostalclavicle from Edinburgh, Scotland

It's just one of those films. It caught me at the start, made me laugh (a lot), didn't stop for about 100 minutes and left me in a particularly breathless state. In a good way. My advice to anyone is to watch this film, especially if you're in a position where you need a good cheering up. The laughs are so rapid and top-notch that I defy anyone to keep a straight face for more than five minutes when put in front of this screwball madness.

And madness is no exaggeration. This film is astonishing – it just leaps from bizarre situation to bizarre situation, never giving in for more than a second. I could go on for days listing my favourite bits – quotes, scenes and that particularly special moment when Cary just went gay all of a sudden! Who can't laugh at Susan's tricks with the olives? Or Major Applegate's frankly odd leopard cry? And "I was born on the side of a hill… I was born on the side of a hill"?!

What makes this film work so fantastically well – apart from the brightness of the gags, the eccentricity of the plot and the nuttiness of the characters – is the superb cast. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn are (obviously) famously strong actors – and I believe that they are both at their best here. They both convey the complete insanity of the film in just the right fashion, with Katharine Hepburn's Susan being the peak of lunacy. She is so, so funny and so fantastically well-timed in her delivery of the jokes that, without everything else, the film would still be propelled along at breakneck speed by her performance alone. Susan is basically on a completely different planet to everybody else altogether – and Hepburn lives there with her quite comfortably in this film!

But although Susan is on another planet – this isn't the only ingredient in the film's recipe for disaster. Seeing as all the other characters are also on their own individual planets, nothing can be done to help! David Huxley's planet is called What's-Happening-To-Me-Today?, and Cary Grant is supreme in this role. He is a man placed in the weirdest situation imaginable and only has his own confusion to work with. Well, that and his charm. It is a role that Cary would repeat again and again in the future, and one that he does exceptionally well here. He is charming, as he always was, but is dragged into Susan's hare-brained existence – becoming a nervous wreck. I cannot emphasise enough how funny it is to watch him at dinner with Susan, Mrs. Carlton-Random and Major Applegate as he repeatedly gets up and walks away mid-conversation in a completely distracted fashion in order to follow George the dog out of the room. He is a man completely confused and utterly frustrated by this screwball that is Susan – who just can't help but drag him in the worst conditions possible. And it's a dream to watch.

Mrs. Carlton-Random (May Robson) and Major Horace Applegate (Charles Ruggles) are also superlative and, sure enough, are never quite on Planet Earth. They are constantly being baffled by the insane goings-on around them and are just funny, funny, funny.

Incidentally, I watched this film for the first time the day after receiving good exam results and I was on a bit of a high – making it funnier still! It is a film with a remarkable ability to make you happy – no matter how down-in-the-dumps you may feel. Similar films, such as the screwball-comedy-homage What's Up, Doc? are often worthy of a watch, but never surpass the quality of humour present in Bringing Up Baby.

10/10

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43 out of 59 people found the following comment useful :-
Arguably the funniest movie ever made, 17 December 2004

Author: inframan from the lower depths

They certainly don't come any funnier than this film. The hilarious golf course scene at the beginning is followed immediately by the equally riotous nightclub scene. This is followed by more memorable set pieces & quotable stick-in-your-mind-forever lines than any movie I can think of, including Bank Dick & Night at the Opera.

Grant & Hepburn are brilliant & innovative. I read some place that when Cary Grant was having trouble finding the David character, Howard Hawks gave him the horn rims & told him to do Harold Lloyd. Which he does. Brilliantly.

I can watch this repeatedly with no more flagging interest than listening to a Beethoven symphony or sonata.

Hard to believe it was a big flop when it first came out.

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33 out of 40 people found the following comment useful :-
Magnificent, joyous japery., 31 January 2003

Author: Tom May (joycean_chap@hotmail.com) from Sunderland, England

"Bringing Up Baby" is a film I unconditionally love; it is so utterly sublime a comedy that I was truly sighing, awed, 'it can't get better than this...' at many points. Yet it regularly does; Hawks keeps the momentum going majestically; it is one incredibly surreal, bizarre tangent going off unexpectedly into another, at every juncture. He photographs and presents his actors in the most charming and amusing possible ways, and the film is certainly a more leisurely, perfectly pitched film than "His Girl Friday", which I nonetheless admire. There is a beauty in the photography and simple choice of perspectives and angles that matches the

There is not one actress in the annals of film who I adore more than Katharine Hepburn; she is a compelling performer, of great charm, intelligence and wit; of very real, idiosyncratic looks that to this eye are beautiful, vivacious, impish. In "Bringing Up Baby" her Susan Vance is a very interesting diversion from her more usual type of character - the slightly superior, in-control ice maiden, as shown in say "The Philadelphia Story". She is phenomenal in that film, yet here beguiling in a completely different fashion, playing a slightly scatterbrained, sprightly, charmingly delinquent woman, who seems to have no control over anything; least of all her feelings for Grant. Her giddy, breathless exuberance and anarchic helplessness are really endearing; it's a wonderful film that stretches out the credulity of Grant's wonderfully straight-laced character's resistance to Miss Vance. The ending is a gorgeous, satisfying pay-off, as he finally gives way, as would we all! It's a charming, suitable ending that rectifies the slight fall-off of the preceding jail section of the film. That is very amusing, but in a more predictable, slightly laboured way. In stark contrast to the first 70-80 minutes of the film, which amounts to about the finest sustained American comedy I have seen of that length - "Way Out West" and "Duck Soup" being shorter in total.

Cary Grant, truly an institution of a comedic player, is very different to his more remembered persona of later years. It's remarkable to see this absurd little man, bespectacled, unworldly and cutting an orthodox figure played so perfectly by the suave Grant. This is gleefully played on with the sublime scene where Hepburn and Grant are trying to catch the leopard - Kate butterfly net in hand! She accidentally happens to break his glasses and is even more taken with him without them... The tension between how we usually remember Grant and the character he is playing here does add an extra layer of amusement to the film. Need I really add that the rest of the film's company are note perfect? Charles Ruggles, Barry Fitzgerald and many more really give the perfectly matched stars a fine backdrop.

I shan't spoil too much of this heady, sublimely silly film... just go and watch it and see Howard Hawks, a master craftsman, at his best - there are no pretensions but making a quite wonderful character comedy - and Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant on insurmountable form. With these delightful stars and anarchic, scintillating comic material, what we have on our hands is an unutterably fine film, one of my very favourites of all time. Where else are you going to get such plot threads running simultaneously as: a hunt for a rare archeological find buried by a dog, an absurd upper-middle-class family dinner and an escaped leopard?

Rating:- *****/*****

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25 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
Belated Brilliance., 20 April 2005

Author: nycritic

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

A complete disaster when it was released, BRINGING UP BABY is screwball comedy to the extreme: absolutely absurd, crackling with dialogue moving faster than a bullet, and unapologetically zany. Starring Katharine Hepburn in her only real foray into playing a "scatterbrained heiress" and Cary Grant as a befuddled paleontologist who's life she disrupts from the moment they meet on a golf course, the story looks almost seems like deliberately crazy plotting: An uptight paleontologist loses the last bone he needs to complete his reconstruction of a dinosaur to an heiresses' dog. This heiress is Katharine Hepburn, and she doesn't make it easier for him, since she's totally self-involved with her own eccentricities, and in one hilarious montage after another we see Grant trying to fetch his bone while getting entangled in the wildest of circumstances, one in particular which includes a tame tiger that is meant for Susan's aunt (May Robson).

Featuring one classic comic scene after another, BRINGING UP BABY is a prime example of a film that was reviled when it came out, most notably because of the arrogant personality of the lead actress and her stature as box-office poison, but one that with repeated views over the years has gained a strong critical praise. While it may be a little too fast in dialogue (and in self-referential in-jokes that only hardcore movie fans will point out) for some people's tastes, just the absurdity of the situation makes it worth watching, and of course, the remarkable chemistry of an athletic Hepburn paired with a dashing Grant.

Remade horribly in 1987 as WHO'S THAT GIRL? with Madonna and Griffith Dunne, it's always good to seek this one out on TCM (which plays it often). Lunatic, but fascinating.

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26 out of 33 people found the following comment useful :-
Utter perfection. Howard Hawks, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant make the most exquisite comedy of the sound era, 2 January 2004

Author: bmacv from Western New York

In his glorious Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks ratchets screwball comedy up to its tautest and springiest level. In clumsier hands, screwball all too often gallops into the frenetic, fraying the nerves; Hawks maintains a presto pace, but never lets the mixups and misunderstandings grow implausible – he just glides serenely to something else. (And he makes it look easy, which it isn't: Peter Bogdanovich fumbled in his loose remake What's Up, Doc, making it labored and literal-minded.)

Hawks could barely go wrong with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant as his leads, but the rest of the cast he assembles, human as well as animal, can't be faulted either (with the redoubtable May Robson earning extra credit). And while he draws on stock characters and stereotypes that probably date back to commedia dell'arte – the stuffy professor, the blithe rich girl, her crusty dowager aunt, the bumbling sheriff – he freshens each one up, making them distinctive, memorable and endearing.

Behind a pair of repressive spectacles, Grant plays the single-minded paleontologist whose path crosses with that of madcap Hepburn, never again to uncross. The plot revolves around a leopard named Baby, a million dollars, an intercostal clavicle bone, a dog named George who buries it....well, it all makes perfect sense while you're watching.

Underneath all the antics, Hawks never loses sight of the pastoral romance that Bringing Up Baby at its core really is (at its most magical in the woods under a full moon, and captured by Russell Metty's lovely photography). Grant's been rooting around in the dirt for so long looking for dinosaur bones that it takes him forever to 'get' Hepburn – an airborne sprite who never comes down to earth. (Their alchemy here is rarefied, not the commoner sort of reaction they kindled in the stage-bound The Philadelphia Story.)

Last but not least, the movie features the canine talents of Asta (né Skippy), who appeared as himself in the Thin Man series – Nick and Nora Charles' lovable cur. Here he plays George, who, barking his stubby tail off, has no qualms about tangling with Baby the leopard. Is there any question that this high-strung wire-haired terrier is and will forever be (pace Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie) Hollywood's top dog? How fitting that he should lend his considerable talents to Bringing Up Baby, the most exquisite comedy of the sound era.

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20 out of 24 people found the following comment useful :-
Classic Screwball Comedy, 8 June 2004
Author: (dj_bassett) from Philadelphia

Maybe the prototypical example of the breed, in fact. Zoologist Grant (we'd call him a paleontologist nowadays) goes to a golf course to try to wrangle money out of a potential donor: along the way he meets up with Katherine Hepburn, and they have all sorts of wacky misadventures.

Grant's great, though it's not a typical role for him -- he's uptight, buttoned down, smothered. He's clearly the superego character, straitlaced and repressed and anti-life (it's no accident he works with bones). Hepburn was never lovelier than she was here -- she's the id character, all action and movement. There's a dedicated minority of people who hate this movie, mostly I think because they see the things Hepburn's character does as cruel. That's the point. Hepburn's not supposed to be nice -- she's id. We laugh partly because Grant needs to be loosened up, but partly because some of Hepburn's actions are shocking. Ideally, we should be in the same position as Grant in the movie: half-attracted, half-afraid.

Great "rat-a-tat" dialog in the classic Hollywood tradition. I can't think of many screenwriters today who could deliver such dialog. Highly recommended, one of the great Hollywood comedies.

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18 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Baby, Oh Where Can You Be?, 26 December 2005

Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Casting Katharine Hepburn in the role she plays her would have been unthinkable years later when her image as a feminist icon was cast in bronze. But she's doing some serious poaching on a young version of the kind of roles Mary Boland or Billie Burke would play. Think of the parts these two women played and you can definitely see Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby if you imagine Boland and Burke years younger.

Bringing Up Baby is one of those beautiful films that really doesn't have a plot. Try to tell someone verbally the plot of this, it cannot be done. From the moment airheaded Kate gets into uptight Cary's car in that parking lot with him chasing her, it's just one madcap situation after another. Howard Hawks directs this film with the appropriate light touch the material requires.

Cary Grant is not the usual suave sophisticate you normally find him cast as either. He's an uptight paleontologist who's biggest thrill up to that point is the arrival of a brontosaurus vertebrae so that he can complete a skeleton. He's also getting married, but the woman he's engaged gives him hints that married life will not be any bed of roses for him. Whether he knows it or not he's ready for the romp Kate has in store for him.

Thirties audiences definitely loved seeing the rich at play. Bringing Up Baby is the definition of escapist entertainment. But one who hasn't the means shouldn't indulge it what Hepburn is doing. They've got a padded cell waiting for anyone who's not rich who indulges in this kind of behavior. Only the rich can afford to be eccentric.

Baby by the way is a tame leopard who Kate's brother sends up from South America. That would be a jaguar by the way, but that's just mere details. Anyway Baby escapes at the same time another leopard from the circus escapes and he's dangerous. I won't go into the confusion there, I couldn't describe it in any event.

May Robson and Charlie Ruggles lend good support. Ruggles who was normally cast against Mary Boland teams up well with May Robson. And my favorite in the supporting cast is Walter Catlett as the small town constable who doesn't know quite what he has on his hands, but is determined to bluff the situation through.

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18 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
Wild, crazy, hysterical, FUN!, 18 September 1999

Author: Tommy-92 from Baltimore, Maryland

Those people who don't like this movie seem to miss the point; IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE RIDICULOUS AND MAKE NO SENSE AT ALL! THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT FUNNY! Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I want to say that I really did have a laugh a minute. Both Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are very adapt at this kind of comedy, in top form here, and work very well together. They have a great, very funny supporting cast, as well; though most are long dead and forgotten, many were well-known character actors in the 30's. They knew their craft, and are great at it here. Howard Hawks must have been some director to be able to fashion such a great movie out of a madcap pace and a script in which everyone talks at the same time and is always ad-libbing. (I've heard those were his trademarks, though.) One scene after another at breakneck pace, but never a dull moment. As soon as one laugh stops, another one begins. In case you haven't gotten the point, I highly suggest you see this movie. It may be 60 years old, but it's still hilarious.

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10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
The paleontologist and the socialite, 19 January 2006

Author: jotix100 from New York

Howard Hawks, the director of "Bringing Up Baby", was not a name one associates with screwball comedy. Watching this perennial favorite the other night, one wishes Mr. Hawks would have made more comedies like this one because he shows a tremendous capacity for entertaining his audiences. The screen treatment, by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde, made this movie the classic it became to be after not being embraced by the public when it was originally released.

The pairing of Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn paid off handsomely. Both actors were at their best in the film. Mr. Hawks got excellent performances of his two stars. Cary Grant's paleontologist, with his glasses, and nervous energy, matches perfectly the the socialite that has designs on him. There is a high level of energy in the film that was a requirement for a movie of this genre.

The supporting cast is also one of the things that make this film the fun it is. Charles Ruggles, May Robson, Barry Fitzgerald, George Irving, and the rest of the cast do a marvelous job in the roles they created. Even Asta, the Charles' dog, made a valuable contribution to the proceedings by appearing at key moments, even fighting Nyssa, the tamed leopard that is the "baby" of the title.

The best way to enjoy the film is to let the magic Howard Hawks created put its spell on you. It's one of the best films of this genre.

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